Ocean Waves is the first of a series of Processing sketches attempting to recreate Amish quilt patterns. I saw an exhibit of Amish quilts at the de Young Museum in San Francisco many years ago and was immediately enamored with them.

Ever since then I have felt that Amish quilts would make interesting dynamic sketches--they are full of geometry and color, and their patterns are like bugs trapped in amber waiting to be animated. There's certainly a lot more I'd like to do with motion and color regarding this particular pattern, but it proved quite challenging just to get it to tile correctly in the first place!

The Ocean Waves pattern is actually comprised of only twelve triangles, which are each flipped and/or rotated to form a complete square tile. These tiles are then chained together in groups of four to make a row and each row is in turn flipped and alternated to create the final pattern.

The only movement you see here is each individual triangle (there are 768 in this rendition) rotating in place on its center. Every 90 degrees this produces an interesting pattern as the triangles "align". As mentioned, I have some fun variations in mind which I will revisit later after I complete some of the other patterns that I'd like to try first.